Doodling Your Way to the Best Ideas: How Sketching And Doodling Can Spark Ideas

Every summer, I would anxiously await my most favourite visitor: Uncle Jack lived in Michigan and he would drive across the border to stay with us for a few days.

Uncle Jack ‘got me’. He may have been the only one who could look at me and truly see my passion… Doodling!

Every time he came for a visit he brought me a gift, and every gift was incredible: boxes of hundreds of crayons with the sharpener built right into the box, colouring books with pages and pages of beautiful images, and perhaps my most favourite of all… the Doodle Art posters.

After he presented me with my gifts, I would scurry away to my room with my new treasures like a squirrel that had just found the biggest acorn of all time! I spent hours upon hours lost in the world of doodling.

It turns out that doodling is more than a humble distraction. While doodling gets a bad rap, it’s associated with better learning, creativity and performance!

Doodling is an incredibly fun and enjoyable activity, and that positive emotion makes us more creative by opening us up to different avenues of thought. Doodling also distracts us from consciously thinking about a problem. It allows for a subconscious incubation of the solution.

Doodling is a lot like dreaming: you can spend all day trying to solve a problem without success, only to wake up in the middle of the night with the answer!

Doodling often triggers insights and discoveries that aren’t possible through words alone. Just think of all those napkins on which million-dollar ideas were sketched out.

Doodling is pivotal to brainstorming sessions and generating new ideas. I always cover the tables with brown craft paper and supply each guest with a selection of new, sharp, Crayola crayons.

Doodles can be anything, from names or signatures repeated over and over again to cartoons to abstract patterns and scribbles.

The next time you find yourself in need of some new ideas, pull out your favourite pens, crayons, or markers and start doodling.

For most people, the big question isn’t “when did you start doodling?” but “when did you stop doodling?” Everyone drew and doodled at one point in their lives.

It’s really not as much about the art as it is the art of thinking!

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